Best of 2000: Best Shuffleboard

The bar's only sign is a blue neon outline of a glass with "Cocktails" written in pink across it. Eleven blocks east of the Gaslamp, this is Landlord Jim's, where locals come to gab, knock back a Bud, and have a game of shuffleboard. Landlord Jim died a couple of years back, but his shuffleboard is a grand old game from 15th-century England. Back then they used to slide a "groat," a large coin worth about four pence. But the game died in the 1960s and has since been hard to find in pubs. Landlord Jim's 22-foot-long wooden table is sprinkled with sawdust. That makes the perfect pitch for the heavy discs you slide down to try to get closest to a jack.